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Poor Advice is
a collection of about two dozen short stories by Lou Gaglia.
Poor
Advice came to my Kindle in a
flash following a short email exchange with the author a few weeks
back. I first became acquainted with Lou Gaglia when my magazine
Umbrella Factory Magazine
ran his short story “Little Leagues” in December of 2011.
It has
been my experience in the years I've worked as an editor for a small
literary magazine that the writers who succeed are the prolific ones.
It's also been my experience that writers who are unafraid of the
process of publication are the writers we get to read. In Lou Gaglia
case, every short story in his Poor Advice
has appeared in a literary magazine first. If there is a lesson to
take from this writer and this book, it is this: write good fiction,
send it out to magazine editors, get rejected, rewrite this good
fiction for a better product and repeat the process. This entire
collection warrants respect because it is well written, well arranged
and it's downright fun.
I get the
impression from many of the short stories that locale or settings are
very real. Mr. Gaglia uses the well known places such as Carnegie
Hall or Long Island trains as backdrops in his stories. It feels like
his New York, and places within it, are oftentimes characters
themselves. Those who live in New York, or those who even have a
perfunctory familiarization with it will no doubt love this
collection.
